| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Historical Lecturers and Essays by Charles Kingsley: descendants of those old Persians, and our old Teutonic forefathers
in their German forests and on their Scandinavian shores--that
Divine book was carried far and wide, East and West, and South, from
the heart of Abyssinia to the mountains of Armenia, and to the isles
of the ocean, beyond Britain itself to Ireland and to the Hebrides.
And that book--so strangely coinciding with the old creed of the
earlier Persians--that book, long misunderstood, long overlain by
the dust, and overgrown by the parasitic fungi of centuries, that
book it was which sent to these trans-Atlantic shores the founders
of your great nation. That book gave them their instinct of
Freedom, tempered by reverence for Law. That book gave them their
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy: at Alderworth, a woman came forth from within. She reclined
over the garden gate as if to refresh herself awhile.
The pale lunar touches which make beauties of hags lent
divinity to this face, already beautiful.
She had not long been there when a man came up the road
and with some hesitation said to her, "How is he tonight,
ma'am, if you please?"
"He is better, though still very unwell, Humphrey,"
replied Eustacia.
"Is he light-headed, ma'am?"
"No. He is quite sensible now."
Return of the Native |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Travels with a Donkey in the Cevenne by Robert Louis Stevenson: the candles? I groped and groped among the tumbled articles, and,
while I was thus groping, suddenly I touched the spirit-lamp.
Salvation! This would serve my turn as well. The wind roared
unwearyingly among the trees; I could hear the boughs tossing and
the leaves churning through half a mile of forest; yet the scene of
my encampment was not only as black as the pit, but admirably
sheltered. At the second match the wick caught flame. The light
was both livid and shifting; but it cut me off from the universe,
and doubled the darkness of the surrounding night.
I tied Modestine more conveniently for herself, and broke up half
the black bread for her supper, reserving the other half against
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